News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Friday April 10, 2020 @09:48AM (#22832947)
Eh. The amount of performance you sacrifice in order to mitigate the very small chance of actually running across any javascript in the wild that a) successfully exploits you, and b) actually retrieves anything worthwhile, just isn't worth it. It's such a tiny risk that it's really only worth mitigating against if you're paranoid or handling particularly sensitive information.
Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by animalCrax0rz on Friday April 10, 2020 @10:40AM (#22833467)
Again, JS can no longer perform this exploit. Browser vendors have disabled (made inoperable) high resolution timing. It's now at 1ms resolution. Not enough timing resolution to mount the attack.
Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by admax88q on Friday April 10, 2020 @10:51AM (#22833586)
Wasn't there a POC of spectre that used a counter in a webworker as a timer?
Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by animalCrax0rz on Friday April 10, 2020 @11:53AM (#22834273)
postMessage cannot provide a reliable timing signal since it goes on the task queue on the receiving end (in the main thread) along with other pending events, and even if there were no other events, there is latency noise in postMessage due to the fact that the web worker is not the only thread running on the CPU. Some suggest that the attack would only take more time as the attacker has to collect a bigger sample, and factor out the noise, but I haven't seen a public exploit based on that.

The other angle of attack that used to be viable was documented in this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057091

But AFAIK all browsers have disabled SAB, e.g. see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

EDIT:

Chrome has re-enabled SAB, with mitigations.

Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by 6510 on Friday April 10, 2020 @01:06PM (#22834966)
Ah, bloat as a security feature. I keep learning new things here!
Re:Make Linux Fast Again (2019) by animalCrax0rz on Friday April 10, 2020 @02:36PM (#22836021)
the minimum essential behavior to implement a feature is one that takes into consideration keeping the user safe from attacks... you could call that bloat, but I wouldn't be sarcastic about it: if you can make the mitigations more concise, you can contribute your ideas, no one stopping you.